"Axel: backstory"

Steam from a melting glacier

your profile hovering
there   Axel as if we'd lain prone at fifteen
on my attic bedroom floor   elbow to elbow reading
in Baltimorean August-
blotted air
		Axel I'm back to you
brother of strewn books   of late
hours drinking poetry scooped in both hands

Dreamt you into existence, did I, boy-
comrade who would love
		everything I loved

Without my eyelash glittering piercing
sidewise in your eye
where would you have begun, Axel   how
would the wheel-spoke have whirled
your mind?   What word
stirred in your mouth without my 
nipples' fierce erection?   our 
twixt-and-between

		Between us   yet
my part belonged to me
		and when we parted
I left no part behind   I knew
how to make poetry happen

Back to you Axel through the crackling heavy
salvaged telephone

I keep going back to poetry itself. Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to die. The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that, and poetry knows that. So everybody we know is going to die and many of us will attend our beloved friends and family. So what each friend who has died has told me is, it’s going to happen to you too. You know, here I go, bye, you know? And every time that happens, it’s a new experience that I feel like I’ve been privileged to be near or close to the door when they’ve gone.

Listen to the whole interview here.

Q:Your new memoir, My Dyslexia, chronicles your discovery that you are dyslexic, something that you didn’t learn until well into your career as a poet. How did you come to realize you were dyslexic?

Philip Schultz:I found out when my son was diagnosed with it in the second grade, back in 2003. I was 58 years old and shocked to learn that all his symptoms were the same as mine, that there was a rational, medical, and scientific explanation for what I as well as others saw as my obdurate stupidity.

I had learned, over time, to segregate my perceptions of myself as a way of tolerating the bad and trying to appreciate the good: Yes, I could make up stories, and draw (I was a cartoonist in high school) and write poems, but I wasn’t smart in most academic subjects like math and science, and I was a painfully slow reader, someone who had to carefully select each book and avoided any unnecessary reading.  I was kicked out of Hebrew school in a week, and the Boy Scouts in two weeks (couldn’t follow instructions or read a map). I sat alone on field trips, which I mostly didn’t go on, though I could entertain my parents’ friends with funny stories and tolerate large amounts of time alone in my backyard, dreaming up adventures.

Q: You write about how much difficult you have reading. What made you want to pursue poetry despite that?

PS: If there’s any one reason it probably has to do with the emotions I was struggling with due to my dyslexia and bullying, which I could express more quickly and directly through poetry. I could encapsulate my ideas and feelings into tiny missiles that alleviated the pressure and stress of constant confrontation, and allowed me islands of peace and relief. I think poetry offered me a sanctuary from a prosaic world of struggle, which it still does, perhaps more often than I’d care to admit.  Poetry was respite and rescue, a cooling place in which to recoil and refine my sense of self; a place to heal. It still is.

Q: In a recent interview with Wired, Brock Eide mentions you as someone who shows one of the strengths of dyslexia—narrative reasoning. He says that dyslexics are better observers of narrative, and that they have a strong memory for stories. Do you think this strength influences your poetry?

PS: Yes, Brock Eide and his wife Fernette have written a valuable book in The Dyslexic Advantage. Their work has been invaluable to people like me, and I thank them. In his interview with Wired Eide highlights four particular strengths he finds dyslexics share, narrative reasoning being one of them. I found early on that that best way to manage, if not survive, many of my experiences in school was to invent a character, a stand-in for me, and then place him in a story similar to whatever ordeal I was struggling through, thereby allowing myself the luxury of creating my own ending. I was an only child in a house full of cantankerous immigrants loudly defying the various accumulated indignities of their fate, and this technique allowed me to not only not be swallowed up completely in the travails of their endless drama to survive, but to carve out an identity that both consoled and encouraged me during dark times. It encouraged further invention and characters until writing itself became a way not only to survive, but to thrive.

I should add, too, that another strength of dyslexia that Mr. Eide mentions is his idea of interconnected reasoning, which, if I understand it correctly, allows someone to see “the big-picture from multiple perspectives.” I can identify with this notion, too, because I’ve been doing some version of this in all my writing for a very long time. Seeing things from multiple points of view is a technique I also used as boy to fortify my own meager position in school and at home, creating entire gangs of imaginary friends who kept me company and shared my adventures. I would hold conversations out loud with several of them in my back yard or at the beach, and learned to balance and juggle a variety of narratives simultaneously. This skill allowed me to write the long poem in my poetry collection Failure, which won the Pulitzer in 2008. “The Wandering Wingless” is a 52 page poem with many characters and narratives and I doubt I would have won the award without it. In daily life my concentration must be focused on a single thing at a time in order to get anything accomplished. Sustaining shifting perspectives in my work allows me to relieve the anxiety that this single-mindedness creates. I use the same technique in shorter poems too, when possible.

Q: You’re also the founder and director of The Writers Studio, which offers classes and workshops for poets and fiction writers. Does your learning disability influence your teaching style? What advice do you give to other writers working with a learning disability?

PS: Although the vast majority of our students aren’t dyslexic, I’ve found that these same techniques help all writers of serious fiction and poetry. I didn’t know I was dyslexic when I discovered my method of writing, which I did by working with non-LD writers. In my first real teaching job, at Kalamazoo College back in the early 70’s I discovered that every student made the same mistake while writing fiction: they used the same I in their stories that they used to write letters and diaries, an I than was really a me.
Once I showed them the invented I’s of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, personages created to express an attitude and temperament, they became excited and started to experiment and move in the direction of fiction, and the imagination.

It took me the next thirty years to perfect and understand this approach, but it’s both mysterious and inspiring for me to realize that a technique that gave me the imaginative room in which to create my ideas and express my feelings, also helped others to do the same. I can’t think of another thing that provides me with more pleasure, and satisfaction.

I finally understand that the life of an artist is in many ways similar to the life of the dyslexic. Both are essentially dysfunctional systems that produce in each individual volumes of anxiety, perseverance, and rejection, as well as creative compensatory thinking. Each, by their very nature, makes a victim of its creator, turning him into an outsider and misfit. It’s true of all artists, I think, at every level of success, the more gifted, the greater and riskier the anxiety and struggle. Each must, without appeal, strive to tolerate its own forms of self-defamation, creative excitement, and lack of forgiveness.

My poetry, like my dyslexia, serves as a giant filter for my darkest feelings and ideas. Sooner or later everything of consequence passes through this filter. Everyone who suffers mild, or seriously debilitating, non-verbal or language-learning disabilities has trouble comprehending “the big picture.” Doubt is its silent partner, its secret sharer. There’s no little irony in the fact that the very things I couldn’t do have helped provide me with a profession and means of knowing myself; that I chose to master the very thing that once hindered and mastered me; to own what once owned me.

People often ask me when and how I knew I was a poet. There are several fancy responses and explanations but one certainly has to do with my longing for solitude. I can spend inordinate amounts of time alone in a room, living entirely in my thoughts and feelings.

I staved off boredom as a child by telling my grandma stories as my mother listened from the dining room, where she counted coins from my father’s vending machines. We’d sit on the tiny blue sofa in the living room, which she used as a bed, and my grandma would listen intently, smiling and nodding, as my dreamy stories took us far away from our unhappy house in Rochester’s inner city.

I can still see them in their peasant dresses surrounded by the drabness of the furniture and peeling wallpaper, and myself in their eyes, where to them I was more than what my performance in school described, more than what my teachers believed I was capable of, more than what I knew and didn’t know about the real world. They knew who I was from my stories. And from the love they felt for me. There are times, while giving a reading, when I will catch myself looking for their faces in the audience. I’m looking for the comfort and encouragement memory provides, and the nostalgia of reclamation. We are the stories we tell, the things we make up and invent, we are more than the answers we give to questions, more even than our limitations—we are the cantankerous, infinitely mysterious dreams we somehow find the courage to imagine and sometimes to tell others.

Writers are archaeologists of their own souls. We dig until we hit bottom only to find there is another bottom underneath and another after that. We are capable of great harm and great sacrifice, but the point of this struggle must have something to do with not giving up. For a long time I couldn’t imagine my life amounting to anything anyone else would view with respect and affection. I didn’t know there was something wrong or different about how my brain processed information and language; I believed there was something wrong with me. I still, on occasion, believe this. Perhaps I always will. But even when the entire world seemed to be ganging up on me, some persisting sense of myself argued on my behalf. I can’t say why exactly, though I’ve always believed what St. Augustine said to be true: “Everything that is, in so far as it is, is good.” And what is good is worthwhile and prevailing. No matter how rich or powerful or intelligent or wise we are, we are also small and inconsequential and of no worth at all. Everyone knows this. But we endure.

From “After a Death,” translated by Robert Bly:

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

The full text of the poem appears here.

The twenty-fourth annual installment, edited by the poet Kevin Young, has just been released, and among the seventy-five poets selected are five Norton poets: Matthew Dickman, Major Jackson, James Longenbach, Gerald Stern, and Rosanna Warren. The whole book is worth seeking out, but here as a taste is Rosanna Warren’s featured poem, “The Latch,” which was included in her collection Ghost in a Red Hat:

The Latch

After scraping eighty-three-year-old paint from four screw heads
holding the latch in place on the studio door,
and, having steadied the door on one out-thrust
    hip and running
the pointed tip of a kitchen knife around the lockbox
    to break the seal

of paint, your neighbor patiently removed each screw with the
    right-size,
old-fashioned screwdriver he had brought and jiggled
    the lock free
so he could pry open its metal back and fish out 
    the broken spring,
the small, dark steel coil, and its detached tongue

which could be replaced, he thought, by an antiquarian locksmith
on the other side of town in la rue du Courreau--
though the latch will be too late to keep in or out
the man who abandoned this house, and the good and 
    ill spirits he courted here. 

Tonight, Matthew Dickman, whose second collection Mayakovsky’s Revolver will be published by Norton in 2012, reads with Matthew Zapruder as part of the Nothing Is Hidden reading series in San Francisco. The theme? Disaster Preparedness. The reading will be livestreamed starting at 10:30 EST. (via Poetry Foundation).

Alternatively, you can get ready with Ai‘s “The Strange Journey of Ulysses Paradeece After a Hurricane.”

from "The Strange Journey of Ulysses Paradeece After a Hurricane"

Lord have mercy, I'm still alive, I thought,
As I floated into the street beside the body of 
      someone familiar,
But I couldn't quite make out who
Then it came to me. It was the nurse's aide,
Now bloated and as dead as Mama Paradeece.
How long had I slept, I wondered,
Holding on to the life jacket,
As I bumped up against a tree whose branches 
      snagged my robe
And tore it off me,
But I held on to the life jacket anyway.
When I heard somebody call to me,
I couldn't open my mouth
And I couldn't let go of the tree either
So I just held on until it got stuck on something
And I broke free. 

You can find the whole poem in her book No Surrender.

“I grew up speaking two languages, both of them mangled, so I am quite at home mashing disparate languages, idioms, and vernaculars together. This is probably most evident in my second book, Dance Dance Revolution, where I tried to invent a Creole. Engine Empire is more disciplined, in that I tried to keep it to one colloquial per section. I love finding the most awkward or unpoetic forms of expression and turning them into high lyricism. I’m a magpie for weird words. It’s a good way to help ‘enlarge the English stock,’ as Hopkins once said.”

Read the rest of their conversation here.

“I think there’s a disadvantage for poets in terms of their recognition. If you don’t live on one of the coasts, it’s easy to be overlooked. There have been any number of writers from the Midwest who haven’t gotten their due because they happen to be, literally, stuck in the middle of the country.”

Read the complete conversation here. Look for Martín Espada’s next collection, The Trouble Ball, in April 2011.

The Winter Anthology is a collection of 21st century literature, American and international. Volume One includes contributions from Yves Bonnefoy, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jean Valentine, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jack Gilbert, Charles Wright, and others. The project is a vehicle for writings that continue to privilege density, precision, earnestness, unapologetically demonstrated intellect, and sensitivity to the numinous. The editors contend that nowhere else in print or on the web can such a concentration of these particular values be found. Various strands of late 20th century thought have done much to problematize these values, but the writings collected in The Winter Anthology are neither sentimental atavisms nor naive attempts at reconstruction. Rather, they are elegies for art and artists, some explicit, many more implicit, conscious of the technological and social forces at work for good and ill in the 21st century.

Simon: Of course you’re writing about three poets here. Are poets a special case above and beyond?

Chang: I feel that poets are particularly interesting. I wrote the book about poets because it seems to me that poets go into their art knowing that they will never be able to make a living at it. I don’t know a single poet who sits down to write a poem and thinks maybe someday this poem will be optioned by James Franco for his next film.

I think that poets, because they think about their art above money, in so many cases are dramatically more interesting to write about than fiction writers.

Listen to the full interview on NPR.

On the prose end, Robin D.G. Kelley won the award in nonfiction for Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press) and Percival Everett won in fiction for his novel I am Not Sidney Poitier (Graywolf Press).

Here is a video of Rita Dove reading from Sonata Mulattica at the 2009 Virginia Festival of the Book:

Poems Out Loud will be featuring readings of many of these fresh new translations from contemporary poets. This post will be updated to include links to each reading as they go live. You can also follow along by subscribing to our Readings RSS feed.

Readings:

• Greg Delanty reads The Wanderer

• Seamus Heaney reads Deor

• Jane Hirshfield reads A Moth Ate Words

• Billy Collins reads My Jacket is Polished Gray

• Nick Laird reads Field Remedy

• Molly Peacock reads I Watched a Wonder, a Bright Marauder

• Paul Muldoon reads Wulf and Eadwacer

• Eavan Boland reads The Wife’s Lament

• Robert Pinsky reads Whale

• Jay Parini reads Precepts

• XJ Kennedy reads The Battle of Finnsburh: a fragment

• Dennis O’Driscoll reads Some Wonder Am I

• Thomas McCarthy reads Against a Dwarf

• David Slavitt reads The Battle of Maldon

• Elizabeth Spires reads A King Who Keeps to Himself Dwells

• Lawrence Raab reads two riddles

• Gail Holst-warhaft reads Riddles

• Marcia Karp reads I Saw, at Foreplaying, Two Wondrous Ones

• Gary Soto reads My Tooth is Long, My Work Even Longer

• Elizabeth Powell reads I Crush and Compress, Ruin and Ravage the Raw

• Enda Wyley reads I Saw Ten of Them Ramble Across the Land

“I was kind of beaten. I wanted to be excited but at the same time I was thinking, ‘Maybe I’m in over my head.’ And I had just gotten off the road, I had curled up in bed. I didn’t want to talk to my mom. I didn’t want to tell anybody how the reading had gone. And the phone rang. And I thought, ‘I’m going to ignore this.’ And the phone rang again. And I thought, ‘no, I’ll answer.’ And it was the call telling me that I had won the [Maureen Egen Writers] Exchange Award.”

For more information on the award, click here.

Huffington Post: “What is your relationship to Algerian writer Kateb Yacine? I mean, as a writer imagining/idealizing a writer. Is there a sense in which you almost envy someone like Yacine, for the reality of his exile?”

Hacker responded:

“Kateb (born in 1929 to a Berber family in Constantine) was a sometime-exile who became a national hero in Algeria as well as a French writer championed by the French avant-garde. From 1970 on, he wrote—and directed and produced—plays in Algerian dialectal Arabic (when practically no one had attempted literature in dialectal language) following, and preceding, plays, novels and poetry in French. “I write in French to tell the French that I am not French,” he once wrote. He was (nonetheless?) awarded the French government’s Grand Prix national des lettres in 1987.

When he died in Grenoble—of leukemia, at barely 60, in 1989—an Algerian fundamentalist mufti issued a fatwa saying that he should not be buried in Algeria, or on Islamic soil—but he had a hero’s funeral, attended by thousands, in Algeria nonetheless. (Like that of Mahmoud Darwish in Ramallah…and there is something similar in the place that each holds nationally.) Kateb was an outspoken proponent of women’s rights, and the Algerian women refused the tradition that they should not take part in the funeral procession: they, too, accompanied his coffin to the grave.

In short, or long, if I envy Kateb anything it is his polyvalent and polyglot genius! He may have resembled the “exiles” in the sequence on one cold afternoon or another, but he was not cut off from the literatures or the life of either of his countries, and his marginality was that of an ideological and aesthetic rebel. (His experience of exile was not that of a Marina Tsvetaeva, or a Joseph Roth.)”

Here’s a short excerpt from Marilyn Hacker’s poem “For Kateb Yacine”:

Yes, war will come and we will demonstrate;
war will come and reams of contraband
reportage posted on the Internet
will flesh out censored stories, second-hand.
Tire-treads lumbering towards its already-fixed
moment jump the interval: this war, the next.

Read the full Huffington Post interview.

Gerald Stern, the author of sixteen poetry collections, has won the National Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award, among others. In July, W. W. Norton published a collection of Stern’s best early work spanning four decades from 1965 to 1992. The following interview was conducted by Stephanie Smith on behalf of Poems Out Loud.

Q: When did you start writing poems?

Gerald Stern: I actually started to write poems when I was in high school though I never truly studied poetry or thought in any way of myself as a poet, whatever that was or might be.

Q: Why did you start writing poems?

GS: It is impossible to answer a question like this, although it is extremely intriguing. The answer would always be psychological. I guess I liked language and how it sounded; I liked to play with ideas; and I had an intense need to express myself indirectly, metaphorically, allegorically, even ambiguously, the way you can in poetry and certainly can’t in the analytical prose required of us in school in those days.

Q: What do you think precipitated your coming into your voice in those early poems of Rejoicings (1973)?

GS: This is a very good question and I have answered it at length in an essay called “Some Secrets,” published in the book In Praise of What Persists and republished in my own book of essays called What I Can’t Bear Losing. Essentially something was happening to my psychologically in my mid to late thirties that made the writing of those poems possible. They were couched in simple, direct, lyrical, personal language. Some of these poems are “When I have Reached the Point of Suffocation,” “The Bite,” “Turning Into a Pond,” and “The Naming of Beasts.”

Q: What are some of your favorite poems?

GS: In addition to the ones I have mentioned from Rejoicings, I might mention in particular poems from Lucky Life, including the poem “Lucky Life,” “Behaving Like a Jew, [listen]” “96 Vandam,” and “Underground Dancing [listen].” Early Collected Poems includes 550 pages, so I could go on and on. Should I mention “The Shirt Poem,” and “The Roar” from The Red Coal, “One Bird to Love Forever” and “Leaving Another Kingdom” from Paradise Poems, “Bella” and “Another Insane Devotion” from Lovesick, “The Bull-Roarer,” “The Founder,” and “The Thought of Heaven” from Bread Without Sugar?

Q: When you were writing some of your more well-known poems such as “Lucky Life,” “Underground Dancing,” “Behaving Like a Jew,” “Soap,” did you have an idea that they would resonate with the culture as much as they have?

GS: Actually I didn’t, maybe I thought “Soap” would, because of its subject. The attention they got was always surprising, delightful, and embarrassing to me.

Q: How does your early work inform your later work?

GS: The easiest way of answering this is that the later work is buried, concealed, or latent in the early work. I have become increasingly more ironic, angry, and direct, without giving up “the song” in my later work. Also, the work in my last few years has come to me with increasing rapidity and clarity.

Q: If you had to, what would you define as the subject matter of your poems?

GS: Needless to say, the nominal “subject matter” might not truly be what a poem is about, but I could say that my poems are extremely political and elegiac and also examine the shared anguish of being human with all of its hopes and ignorance—and limitations. They may consist of a memory of the death of a dear friend, a cultural loss, or the struggle for social justice and decency. But I don’t want to imply that they are sermons for, in my cases, they are, as critics have observed, ironic, humorous, and even funny.

]]> Interviews, Columnists 2010-09-17T16:00:41+00:00 The Editors http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/poems_that_stick_with_us/ This week we’ve been finding out a lot about how accomplished poets feel about their earliest published work. We’ve asked Beth Ann Fennelly, Eavan Boland, Linda Pastan, and Stephen Dunn what they think about their first book now and how they went about creating their first collection. Today, we simply wanted to find out which of their early poems still stick with them to this day. Here’s what they had to say:

Beth Ann Fennelly: I still like the young love poems I wrote for my husband.  Maybe because I still like my husband.




Eavan Boland: I still feel connected to one poem in my first book called “Athene’s Song.” It’s about a woman trying to choose art and language, when her official role is as the goddess of war.



Stephen Dunn: Some still please me. “What,” “Teacher Answering Young Radicals,” “Sympathetic Magic,” “Biography in the First Person,” “Men in Winter,” “Day and Night Handball,” and “How to be Happy: Another Memo to ‘Myself.’”


Linda Pastan: There are many poems in my first book that I continue to feel strongly about and continue to include in readings.  Some of them are: “Notes from the Delivery Room,” “At the Gynecologist’s,” “Emily Dickinson,” “Passover,” “A Dangerous Time.”

]]> News, Interviews 2010-07-16T14:32:51+00:00 The Editors http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/best_poems_best_order/ Yesterday we asked four poets how the feel about the work they published years ago. Now, the same four poets tell us how they struggled to find the best order for the poems in their debut collection. The methods range from rudimentary to abstract, logical to magical. There seems to be no right way, but in each case the poet knew the moment it felt right. Here is Beth Ann Fennelly, Stephen Dunn, Eavan Boland, and Linda Pastan looking back on their first book of poetry.

 

Eavan Boland: I published my first collection, New Territory, when I was 23. No book I wrote or published afterward had as simple a framework: I just put together the poems as I wrote them and when I had enough they turned—magically it seemed at the time—into a book. Of course I never used that method of crude accumulation again. But at the time it seemed logical. And besides, I didn’t know any better.

Stephen Dunn: I tried to compile what seemed like the best poems I’d written up to that point. If anything held them together, it was voice. The manuscript was rejected for about two years. Then I wrote a long-ish poem in sections called “Sympathetic Magic,” and put it in the manuscript. It seemed to collect the other poems around it, and gave the manuscript a coherence it hadn’t had. It was taken almost right away, by the University of Massachusetts Press. The book is called Looking for Holes in the Ceiling.

Beth Ann Fennelly: I struggled to find a good organizational structure for Open House, because the poems vary pretty widely in style and tone. For example, there was a section of blank verse dramatic monologues, and a section comprised of a twenty page long experimental poem in the form of a writer’s notebook. The collection finally gained some cohesion when I decided to think of the different sections as rooms in a house. Each room in a house has a function different than the others; each room may have an awareness of the others, a communication between them, but has its own identity. When I thought of that metaphor, I came up with the title, Open House, and the book felt done for the first time.

Linda Pastan: Though many of my poems continue to reflect the changing seasons, nearly all of the poems in my first collection did so. Hence the title: A Perfect Circle of Sun. It was easy, therefore, to divide the book into four parts, one per season.

]]> News, Interviews 2010-07-15T15:59:59+00:00 The Editors http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/test_of_time/ The recent publication of Gerald Stern’s Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992 made us curious about how poets feel about their early work. Would they agree with Pericles when he said, “Time is the wisest counselor of all?” We got in touch with Beth Ann Fennelly, Eavan Boland, Linda Pastan, and Stephen Dunn and got the scoop on how they react to their early poetry now that a few years have passed.

Beth Ann Fennelly: Open House in some ways feels written by a different person, although it’s only ten years old.  I can only imagine how Gerald Stern feels when viewing poems he wrote 40 years ago! Sometimes when I look at those poems, I feel the bemused affection one feels looking at old photographs—I recognize myself a bit, but Lord, what was I wearing!  And why didn’t someone tell me to comb that cowlick out of my hair?

Eavan Boland: I think most poets need to be careful about their early work. It can all too easily feel like a friendship you’ve grown out of. It’s hard not to feel distant—and not just from the poems you’ve written but also the poet who wrote them. I try to be practical about it. I think of first books in general as part of a written record, a sort of tracking device that shows where a poet began. As such they have a real value. The worst thing you can do is try to re-write or polish that early work. That becomes a kind of forgery.

Linda Pastan: Though my subject matter changes as I age, I seem to have found my “voice” fairly early. I still feel quite attached to many of the poems in my earliest books.




Stephen Dunn: About half of it holds up. It should be said that all of the poems in my first book were written after I was thirty.

]]> News, Interviews 2010-07-14T16:05:13+00:00 The Editors http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/people_poetry_and_videotape/ Following a tip from Poets & Writers on Twitter, I just read an article in Canada’s National Post about Katherine Leyton. Leyton is a young poet from Toronto who, with the help of a few friends, has been asking strangers to read poetry on camera for the blog, How Pedestrian. From the National Post article:

“I’ve been very surprised by how open people are to being approached, to hearing about the project and to engaging with poetry in front of a camera,” she says, and adds that about 95% of the people she approaches agree to read, and that those who refuse usually do so because they’re nervous about the camera, not the poetry. “I’m bothering people randomly, and yet almost everyone is genuinely excited about participating. The experience has really reminded me of how alive [Toronto] is,” she says. The majority of readers react noticeably to what they are reading, and many request to keep a copy of the poem, to which she always readily agrees.

Sometimes, the week’s poems are grouped around a theme, often tied to an event in Toronto. For two weeks in June she captured the World Cup fever that is consuming the city, bringing poems about soccer to the bars and cafes where supporters congregate. Last week featured G20 protesters reading poems about resistance.

Click through to watch one of the videos filmed at the G20 protests in Toronto.

Woman reading “Implosions” by Adrienne Rich in Toronto, June 2010

What do you think? Is the How Pedestrian blog on to something?

]]> News 2010-07-08T16:39:22+00:00 Gerald Stern http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/early_poems_gerald_stern/ What I attempted to do in this Early Collected—the first six books of my collected poems—is to reach out simultaneously for a new language and a new subject matter. I was interested in that which was overlooked, neglected, and unseen, from a political, religious, and personal point of view and a voice that bespoke this in the simplest, most honest manner. I found myself returning to early—to fundamental—experiences, as I found myself discovering a new language. This constituted a celebration as well as a kind of mourning or elegy, and the results can be seen in such poems as “Lucky Life,” “The Blue Tie,” “Stepping Out of Poetry,” and “Bob Summer: The Final Poem.” This was a difficult road to hoe, for it expressed neither formal, academic niceness nor bohemian madness. If there are sources they are variously in the Hebrew prophets, in Blake, in Whitman, in Ovid, in Coleridge, and, as far as modern poets, in Yeats, Stevens, Pound, and Hart Crane.

I believe the search for the oppressed became identified, in my poetry, with the very particulars of my own life: including the oppression of working-class people in the city of Pittsburgh, where I came from, and the abuse of minorities, particularly Jews and blacks. This even includes the attention I gave not just to individuals but to plants—weeds, say—which are also hated and neglected. But most of all, the death of my sister, Sylvia, at an early age, who became, as it were, the muse of my poetry. I spent my earliest years reading a little but mostly wandering—endlessly—through the streets of Pittsburgh. The results of this would show twenty, thirty years later.

Related:
An Interview with Gerald Stern
Listen to Stern read three poems

* * *

Stern’s Early Collected Poems: 1965—1992 includes poems from Rejoicings, Lucky Life, The Red Coal, Paradise Poems, Lovesick and Bread Without Sugar. Here is a preview inside the book:

]]> Columnists, Featured Columns 2010-06-21T13:16:47+00:00 Nicholas Carr http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/oral_world_written_word/ Early in the fourth century BC, when the practice of writing was still novel and controversial in Greece, Plato wrote Phaedrus, his dialogue about love, beauty, and rhetoric. In the tale, the title character, a citizen of Athens, takes a walk with the great orator Socrates into the countryside, where the two friends sit under a tree beside a stream and have a long and circuitous conversation. They discuss the finer points of speech making, the nature of desire, the varieties of madness, and the journey of the immortal soul, before turning their attention to the written word. “There remains the question,” muses Socrates, “of propriety and impropriety in writing.” Phaedrus agrees, and Socrates launches into a story about a meeting between the multi-talented Egyptian god Theuth, whose many inventions included the alphabet, and one of the kings of Egypt, Thamus.

Theuth describes the art of writing to Thamus and argues that the Egyptians should be allowed to share in its blessings. It will, he says, “make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories,” for it “provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.” Thamus disagrees. He reminds the god that an inventor is not the most reliable judge of the value of his invention: “O man full of arts, to one is it given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them. And so it is that you, by reason of the tender regard for the writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect.” Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, “it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” The written word is “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance.” Those who rely on reading for their knowledge will “seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing.” They will be “filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom.”

Socrates, it’s clear, shares Thamus’s view. Only “a simple person,” he tells Phaedrus, would think that a written account “was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters.” Far better than a word written in the “water” of ink is “an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner” through spoken discourse. Socrates grants that there are practical benefits to capturing one’s thoughts in writing—“as memorials against the forgetfulness of old age”—but he argues that a dependence on the technology of the alphabet will alter a person’s mind, and not for the better. By substituting outer symbols for inner memories, writing threatens to make us shallower thinkers, he says, preventing us from achieving the intellectual depth that leads to wisdom and true happiness.

Unlike the orator Socrates, Plato was a writer, and while we can assume that he shared Socrates’ worry that reading might substitute for remembering, leading to a loss of inner depth, it’s also clear that he recognized the advantages that the written word had over the spoken one. In a famous and revealing passage at the end of The Republic, a dialogue believed to have been written around the same time as Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates go out of his way to attack “poetry,” declaring that he would ban poets from his perfect state. Today we think of poetry as being part of literature, a form of writing, but that wasn’t the case in Plato’s time. Declaimed rather than inscribed, listened to rather than read, poetry represented the ancient tradition of oral expression, which remained central to the Greek educational system, as well as the general Greek culture. Poetry and literature represented opposing ideals of the intellectual life. Plato’s argument with the poets, channeled through Socrates’ voice, was an argument not against verse but against the oral tradition—the tradition of the bard Homer but also the tradition of Socrates himself—and the ways of thinking it both reflected and encouraged. The “oral state of mind,” wrote the British scholar Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato, was Plato’s “main enemy.”

Implicit in Plato’s criticism of poetry was, as Havelock, Ong, and other classicists have shown, a defense of the new technology of writing and the state of mind it encouraged in the reader: logical, rigorous, self-reliant. Plato saw the great intellectual benefits that the alphabet could bring to civilization—benefits that were already apparent in his own writing. “Plato’s philosophically analytical thought,” writes Ong, “was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes” In the subtly conflicting views of the value of writing expressed in Phaedrus and The Republic, we see evidence of the strains created by the transition from an oral to a literary culture. It was, as both Plato and Socrates recognized in their different ways, a shift that was set in motion by the invention of a tool, the alphabet, and that would have profound consequences for our language and our minds.

In a purely oral culture, thinking is governed by the capacity of human memory. Knowledge is what you recall, and what you recall is limited to what you can hold in your mind. Through the millennia of man’s preliterate history, language evolved to aid the storage of complex information in individual memory and to make it easy to exchange that information with others through speech. “Serious thought,” Ong writes, was by necessity “intertwined with memory systems.” Diction and syntax became highly rhythmical, tuned to the ear, and information was encoded in common turns of phrase—what we’d today call clichés—to aid memorization. Knowledge was embedded in “poetry,” as Plato defined it, and a specialized class of poet-scholars became the human devices, the flesh-and-blood intellectual technologies, for information storage, retrieval, and transmission. Laws, records, transactions, decisions, traditions—everything that today would be “documented”—in oral cultures had to be, as Havelock says, “composed in formulaic verse” and distributed “by being sung or chanted aloud.”

The oral world of our distant ancestors may well have had emotional and intuitive depths that we can no longer appreciate. McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense “sensuous involvement” with the world. When we learned to read, he argued, we suffered a “considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.” But intellectually, our ancestors’ oral culture was in many ways a shallower one than our own. The written word liberated knowledge from the bounds of individual memory and freed language from the rhythmical and formulaic structures required to support memorization and recitation. It opened to the mind broad new frontiers of thought and expression. “The achievements of the Western world, it is obvious, are testimony to the tremendous values of literacy,” McLuhan wrote.

Ong, in his influential 1982 study Orality and Literacy, took a similar view. “Oral cultures,” he observed, could “produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche.” But literacy “is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself.” The ability to write is “utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials,” Ong concluded. “Writing heightens consciousness.”

In Plato’s time, and for centuries afterward, that heightened consciousness was reserved for an elite. Before the cognitive benefits of the alphabet could spread to the masses, another set of intellectual technologies—those involved in the transcription, production, and distribution of written works—would have to be invented.

* * *

The above is an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. With The Shallows, Carr makes the convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence—from the oral tradition to the written word, and now the Internet.

]]> Columnists, Featured Columns 2010-06-18T14:12:29+00:00 The Editors http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/julie_sheehan_summer_tour_dates/ Julie Sheehan has lots of readings coming up to support her new collection Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise. Check out all her Summer 2010 tour dates after the jump.

Photo by Chip Cooper

6/16 - New York, NY - Cornelia Street Cafe, 6PM
6/19 - Sag Harbor, NY - Canio’s Books, 6PM
7/13 - New York, NY - Poets House, 7PM
8/12 - Berkeley, CA - Moe’s Books, 7:30PM
8/14 - East Hampton, NY - East Hampton Public Library, 5PM
8/17 - Seattle, WA - Elliott Bay Bookstore, 7PM
9/24 - Los Angeles, CA - Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center

Listen to Julie Sheehan read “Brandy Stinger” from Bar Book.

]]> News 2010-06-10T16:17:17+00:00 The Editors http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/youre_a_poet_you_say/ Guest contribution by Andrew Hudgins:

When strangers ask me what I do, I usually follow the lead of W. H. Auden, who said he was a teacher. So much easier than saying “poet,” and having to deal with the inevitable follow-ups: Have I heard of you? What books have you written? Do they sell that in bookstores? 

Those questions are just tune-ups for the really hard one.

“You’re a poet, you say?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“What kind?”
“Yeah, what kind of poetry do you write?”

I know I’m being offered an opportunity to promote an art that needs promotion and maybe sell a book or two. I know the question is coming, but like a recalcitrant student, I’m always unprepared.

If another poet asks, the answer is easy: “I write in blank verse about seventy percent of the time, mostly in the plain style, and often about history, my family, the South, and religion. But lately I’ve been writing a lot more free verse on the one hand, while working a lot more with rhyme on the other hand.”

That’s not the answer the guy was looking for yesterday, as he picked the label off his second bottle of Michelob at my brother’s Memorial Day BBQ in Albertville, Alabama. 

“Um, uh, well I write a lot of poems about history,” I said. History sounds serious. Writing about your family sounds too damn Oprah-ish. And I just don’t like to talk about the South to Southerners or about religion with pretty much anybody.

The history answer invited suspicion. It usually does. “Poetry isn’t about history,” say the dubious looks of my inquisitors. And I don’t want to explain about The Bible, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and Shakespeare’s histories. We poets and professors are all too ready to unleash the horrible harrumph, harrumph of elucidation. 

Self-defeatingly, even though I know nobody but poets care, I sometimes give the formal answer.

“I write a lot of poems in blank verse,” I say.
Blank verse. Blank stare.
“Oh, you know what it is. It’s the form Shakespeare wrote his plays in.”
“I think I’ve heard of it. In high school maybe, but I’m not sure.”

The explanatory harrumph, harrumph begins to gather in my throat like German troops along a border, so I move quickly along.
 
“Sometimes the poems rhyme.”
 
The conversation now divides like Frost’s two roads in a yellow wood.

First response: “I thought poetry didn’t rhyme anymore. I liked poetry in elementary school, but after that, when it stopped rhyming, that’s when I stopped reading it.”

Second response: “I thought poetry didn’t rhyme anymore.”  And then the wary silence invites you to explain why you didn’t get the memo about rhyme being old-timey. Are you like the kook at the office who still uses the mimeograph machine?

It’s hard to whine to the Michelob drinker that he’s asking you to label and limit your life’s work, when he’s just done that for you:

“Real estate.” 
“What kind of real estate?”
“Mostly commercial. Some industrial. But I have done residential when it falls in my lap.”

I wish I’d had the guts to simply say, “Here’s a poem,” and started reciting.  But that would be even less of an answer—like his reading a purchase agreement and expecting me to know what it meant about what he did.

Here on a blog for poets and poetry lovers, it is the only and best answer.

“The Names of the Lost” from the book American Rendering, and originally published in The Hudson Review:

The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer—
ninety-four at midnight, eighty at dawn. Late June,
a high-speed chase. Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner

rammed off the road and hustled from their car.
Wayne Roberts asked, “Are that nigger-lover?” 
The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer.

“I know exactly how you’re feeling, sir,”
said Schwerner. Roberts shot him in the heart.
They shot them all: Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner.

“You didn’t leave me nothing but a nigger,”
Jim Jordan griped.  “But at least I killed me one.” 
The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer.

Ray Killen prayed a funeral prayer. The preacher
beseeched God’s mercy on these communists,
these agitators—Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner—

before they buried them, using a bulldozer.
The murderers, old men now, still walk the town.
The nights burned all night long that Freedom Summer.
Ask Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner.

* * *

Andrew Hudgins is the author of American Rendering: New and Selected Poems, Shut Up, You’re Fine: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children (illustrated by Barry Moser), and After the Lost War. He teaches at Ohio State University.

 

]]> News 2010-06-09T19:39:22+00:00 The Editors http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/griffin_trust_recognizes_adrienne_rich/ On Tuesday, June 2nd, Adrienne Rich received The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award, citing fellow female writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein, Anne Carson, Nicole Brossard, Lisa Robertson and Dionne Brand as inspirations. Since receiving the Yale Younger Poets award in 1951, at the tender age of 21, Rich has strived to make the political personal in her poetry and prose. Rich’s list of achievements is extensive, to say the least, and she has authored 30 books of poetry and prose. It goes without saying that Rich has shaped the content and the form of American poetry in the latter half of the 20th century. I’ll go even further to say that she has been a driving force in dictating the place of women in literature and in the world. I remain truly grateful that she dove into that wreck.

Look for Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007—2010, a new work from Adrienne Rich, in January 2011.

]]> News 2010-06-09T19:34:20+00:00 Kimiko Hahn http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/merging_margins/ In the current Broadway play Red, Mark Rothko shouts at his assistant for never having read such writers as Nietzsche. It’s both an attack on the younger man’s perceived lack of cultural literacy and a provocative way for the older artist to mentor. All the while, classical music is playing in the background in a kind of surround-sound tutoring. The audience comes to discover something about the assistant’s own musical preferences when he plays a Chet Baker record while the master is out wheeling and dealing in the art world. We also learn that the assistant’s artistic taste runs more toward Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns than toward the high modernism of his self-aggrandizing guru. I’m impressed by the variety of culture represented in that studio.

When I was about that young man’s age, say twenty-eight, I was in the throes of an art movement here in New York City. It was 1983, and the group became known as Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. Reagan was president and he was funding “freedom fighters” to undermine the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and elsewhere in the region. We congregated in the loft of Leon Golub and Nancy Spero.

(Note: At the risk of sounding too much like the pontificating Rothko of Red: they are crucial to that moment and beyond. So if, dear reader, you don’t know who either of these artists are, then please Google—or better yet, check out Golub’s prints at the Drawing Center; Spero’s The Torture of Women is in book form.)

The significance of that particular social concern has faded. But what has remained for me is the sense of camaraderie, learning a bit about grassroots-style organizing (in this case of artists), and the experience of hanging out with artists from other media. I was not only meeting with visual artists, I was going to see their work in galleries and even on the street. The same was true of theater, film, dance, and music. It was a heady education in the art scene of the day. (City context: imagine a pre-gentrified Soho.)

Urban Photography. Photo by Janrito Karamazov on flickr.

The point I wish to make is that it is not enough for writers to read—and read widely. In a display of support, writers need to support one another. (It needn’t be expensive with public libraries and Poets House.) And we should also fan out to experience other art forms. I know this can be daunting, but with some artfulness there are ways around great expense. I also know it’s difficult to discover what dance performance to see if one is not acquainted with the dance world. But in the case of city dwellers, the main venues are a place to start. And in the summer there are free (or nearly free) outdoor events. There are Web sites for events (see the Poetry Society of America). But maybe, if we writers seek out other arts, those artists and performers will make their way into our “margins” as well.

Or perhaps we just need to organize ourselves into, say, Artists Against Offshore Drilling.

]]> Columnists, Featured Columns 2010-05-20T21:32:18+00:00 The Editors http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/reading_at_length_celebrates_first_anniversary/ The online magazine At Length is celebrating their first anniversary in New York City tomorrow night (5/15) by serving up an evening of poetry and music. The entertainment for the evening includes Kimiko Hahn (reading from her brand new collection Toxic Flora), Joanna Klink, Major Jackson, Craig Morgan Teicher, and The Lisps. Admission is free but the location is super secret so send an rsvp to rsvp@atlengthmag.com to get all the details. Doors are at 7:30.

]]> News 2010-05-14T16:33:47+00:00 Kimiko Hahn http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/hand_weights_and_newspapers/ Young writers—as well as random people who come up to me after a reading—often want to know the tricks of the trade. And there are a few that I learned as an undergrad (show don’t tell; every item on a list needs to be equally extraordinary; etc.). In general I frustrate the person by simply badgering her or him to read more poetry, both classic and contemporary.

But the truth is I do have my own “tricks.” This feels like a good moment to share one in particular.

When I taught workshops in the past, I used to bring in a volume of Emily Dickinson, a hand weight, and a newspaper. The first was obviously in the “go read poetry” category. The hand weight was there to remind students to take care of their bodies (since even the deskbound have bodies). And the third was meant to inspire them to read the newspaper.

Edward Schildhauer Relaxing at a Desk. Photo by Wisconsin Historical Images.

I realize that the latter might sound terribly old-fashioned: read the news printed on paper? So my updated advice for our cyber-age is to somehow get the news. As William Carlos Williams noted in “Asphodel”:

                                            It is difficult
                      to get the news from poems
                                             yet men die miserably every day
                                                           for lack
                       of what is found there.

Yes, the quote is out of context, but I think Williams would forgive me since he was also concerned with world events and catastrophe. I believe that writers especially need the news because, for one, we deal with language and ideas. Second, the world outside expands the inner life of the writer. Third, I believe that influences from diverse spheres, personal and public, make for potentially more complex material. Not complicated, but complex!

What do I read and what do I find? I am a very slow reader, and on Sundays, faced with umpteen sections of the New York Times, I try to get through the Week in Review and, later over lunch, the first section and something from the Book Review. (If I’m feeling frisky, I’ll look at real estate classifieds for “fun” or a Guy Trebay piece on fashion.) During the week I read over whatever jumps out at me—especially in Tuesday’s Science section. I also pick up the Daily News for the comics and horoscope and a different take on events. Plus I relish its fuggedaboudit-tone. And on Fridays I pick up the Wall Street Journal, fancying that it might offer an alternate view; at the very least, I like to check out their Weekend section.

I am not suggesting that a writer has to write about the news. Of course no one has to write social or political poems. (Although I do encourage my students to write a piece using “outside material”—just as I encourage them to write a tanka or a sonnet.) My interest is in language and ideas. And I have always found inspiration in newspapers. Also, I know I would not be the poet—or the person—I have become without the news in its many forms, including television news that ranges from PBS to Comedy Central.

For me, personally, the news extends the range of song. The news colors the song. And the news even influences the form of that song—whether sonnet or collage. The material itself triggers deep emotional material in much the way a smell evokes a childhood memory. I certainly would not wish to dismiss or disregard this kind of rich dimension. (Apparently, even Emily Dickinson kept up with the news—especially sensational crimes and disasters.) On the other hand, I admit that reading the news, on paper or online, will not necessarily produce more radiant poetry. Still, it will make one’s life richer—and that is a step in a potentially radiant direction. And it will make each person more of a citizen of this fragile planet.

And why wouldn’t a writer wish to learn about current events? Honestly, I can’t stand the person (poet or otherwise) who claims, “The news is too depressing!” Or, “I don’t have the time!” Or, “The news has nothing to do with me!” Those excuses are so pathetic that I find I don’t have time for people with such an attitude. When she or he is my student, well then, it’s my task to engage them. What is not fascinating about the New York Times, Friday, May 7, 2010:

“They trade bomb makers and people around. It’s becoming a witches’ brew.”—senior U.S. intelligence official in “Pakastani Taliban Are Said to Expand Alliances”

“If you see Joseph Laubinger on your doorstep, start packing.”

“As Homeowner Dreams Die, He’s the Undertaker”

“[American] Group Backs Ritual ‘Nick’ as Female Circumcision Option”

“That marsh is really our pantry.”—New Orleans chef

“Fish Sells Out as [Oil Spill] Threat Creeps Closer”

After a recent conference out of town, I came home to discover that “over 300 people in northwest China” had perished in an earthquake. Not only was I shocked at the scope of the tragedy, I was also disappointed in myself. How did I not hear that? It felt shameful not to know. (Later reports placed the death toll at 2200.)

To completely rephrase Williams, men and women risk their lives to bring us news. On page A10: “Abducted Kurdish Writer Is Found Dead in Iraq.” He gave his life so we might have the events of the day. What better way to honor this death, than to read the news.

]]> Columnists 2010-05-11T18:07:20+00:00 The Editors http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/write_poetry_review_for_the_rumpus/ Well, here’s your chance. Rumpus poetry editor, Brian Spears, is “in awe” of Sandra Beasley’s second poetry collection I Was the Jukebox and is looking for someone to review it for the online magazine. From Spears’s blog:

I finished Sandra Beasley’s latest, I Was the Jukebox, and I am in awe of it…just pure awe. It’s not what I do, and it’s not what I want to do, but damn, do I want to read it again. It’s easily one of the best collections I’ve read this year so far. Now I just need someone to offer to review it for The Rumpus for me.

Send your pitch to review this awe inspiring new collection to Brian at poetry AT therumpus.net.

]]> News 2010-05-10T18:59:29+00:00 The Editors http://poemsoutloud.net/columns/archive/marilyn_hackers_elegy_for_mahmoud_darwish/ This week’s “Poem of the Week” selection from The Guardian, chosen by the poet Carol Rumens, is the final poem from Marilyn Hacker’s most recent collection, Names. The poem is called “A Braid of Garlic.” Rumens writes:

A Braid Of Garlic, the last poem in the collection, is partly an elegy for Mahmoud Darwish, “whom, daring, I called a brother”. The verse is written in an informal Sapphic quatrain, its stanzas sometimes impressionistic ‘scenes’ or vivid jottings. The dying fall of the feminine endings and foreshortened last lines seems appropriate to the overall mood. But against this sorrowful cadence is pitted a vigorous appetite for joy and survival, expressed in the muscularity of the syntax, and embodied by the “aging women” who continue valiantly to shop and write and celebrate their “memories and continence”.

Read Marilyn Hacker’s “A Braid of Garlic” at The Guardian.

]]> News 2010-05-10T14:56:43+00:00